If that's the case... I haven't seen any drive to recruit new coders for the dev team. Why is that not happening so new coders can join the team and resume development? I don't mean to sound accusatory, just really curious as to why that is not the case.

I suspect combat could be implemented sooner and maybe even rolled out in pieces if we ceased the one life scenario and gave people a chance to have multiple lives via either a timer so that when Hp reaches -10 they are out of the game for a week and wake up in a designated faction hospital.

One of the possible ideas of combat is that once you reach 0 HP you aren't dead, but stunned/unconscious. It would take someone walking up and using an improved A/E style system to actually kill you. So it wont be as easy to kill PCs, you would still need to go up and finish the job.